Create A Social Media Calendar With These Free Templates

Make your own social media calendar right now with your kit that complements this blog post. You’ll get:

An editorial calendar template PDF to help you organize the broad strokes of your strategy. This calendar works great with Post-It notes to help you easily brainstorm your to-do list.

A social media calendar template Excel spreadsheet to help you plan the three tiers of your editorial calendar. This includes complete worksheets for each month to help you plan the best content for each network.

A data-driven guide and Excel spreadsheet to help you create even better, more sharable content. The content calendar Excel spreadsheet walks you through an advanced way to use your own Google Analytics and insights from your audience to grow your traffic.

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Get Your Free Social Media Calendar Kit!

Get Your Free Social Media Calendar Kit!

3 Must-Haves Of A Successful Editorial Calendar

There are three phases for solid editorial planning—and you’ve probably already mastered the first two. Now it’s time to perfect your social media calendar, which falls in the third phase:

1. The Broad And General Calendar

You’ll need an overarching calendar to help you focus on topics that matter to your audience.

For bloggers and content marketers, it would be perfect to schedule your broad topic calendar four to six months out. That gives you the opportunity to plan new content based your audience’s reactions.

You can base your general calendar on the model from traditional magazines. They typically offer these sorts of editorial calendars for an entire year to attract advertisers for specific magazine issues.

You can then assign the specific dates when you’ll share each of these messages, which usually takes place immediately after you’re done creating the content you’ll share (but you can plan this ahead of schedule with the right tools).

It’s this third layer where your social media calendar comes into play—it’s really just a component of your promotion calendar.

What Makes Up A Good Social Media Calendar?

It seems like a lot of content marketers create great content, share it when it goes live, and then they call it good. They’re all missing out on their own 3,150% more click-throughs.

Instead of taking this minimalist approach, a great social media calendar maximizes exposure of your content on the social networks your audience uses—without being spammy.

As you plan your content, these eight things can make or break your social media calendar.

1. Understand Why Your Audience Shares Your Content

Once you understand the psychology of why your audience shares, you can create content in ways that are most likely to connect with them. This will help you plan awesome content from the get-go, and help you interact—socialize—with your audience using social media.

A report from The New York Times Customer Insight Group found five major reasons why people share content with their networks:

84% share to support a cause.

78% share to stay connected with those they know.

69% share to feel involved in the world.

68% share to define themselves.

49% share for entertainment or to provide valuable content to others.

The study also found that 73% of the survey takers shared content to understand the information more thoughtfully.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of lessons to learn from this knowledge. As you plan your social media calendar, keep this in mind:

Make Sure Your Content Is Extremely Entertaining Or Useful (You Get Bonus Points If It’s Both)

We took this lesson to heart when we launched our headline analyzer as a free tool to help our audience write better headlines.

Now a year and some odd months later, the average on page time is 5 minutes and 58 seconds, and our audience has improved millions of headlines.

Help Them Define Themselves

Create content about your different customer types and help them self-identify. That will help you, and help them connect with your content.

Help Them Connect With Others

Imagine the possibilities a forum—or even a larger brand ambassador program—could present for your customers to ask each other questions and learn from one another. You could even start as simple as a Twitter chat.

While some of this is more about creating awesome content in the first place, this is the backbone on which you’ll build your social media calendar. But without sharing good content in the first place, why would anyone want to interact with you?

2. Figure Out What Content Works For Specific Social Networks

Some content lends itself better for certain social networks. And—assuming you know your audience—you’re using specific social media to target your customers.

Can you share your same piece of content on multiple networks? Yes. Just make sure your social media messages follow these best practices to get the most traffic.

Use Twitter To Share Business Tips And Show A Little Personality

Twitter has become content marketers’ best friend recently. That’s because one of the best ways to use Twitter is to share helpful business tips.

And after all, that’s exactly what you’re creating in your content, right?

Other content types that work well for sharing are news and things going on behind the scenes to share your business’ passion.

Facebook Is For Entertainment

Facebook Tip: Share entertaining content. Think of quizzes that are fun to take or comment on—and then you also get some cool data. Or think of storytelling and how inspirational or emotional stories seem to light up your newsfeed.

Facebook posts with less than 100 characters typically perform the best. Combine this with images and videos, and your posts will be even more likely to increase your engagement.

Facebook Tip: Share visual content on Facebook with a message less than 100 characters long.

Use LinkedIn To Share Your Business And Industry News

I’m not talking cheesy press releases here that are all about you. I’m talking about valuable information like business case studies, how-to posts—examples of how to grow professionally as a person and business in your niche.

Remember that people use social media to define themselves and build relationships? LinkedIn is exactly that for professionals.

It’s no secret that Pinterest is dominated by women users—80% of their entire user base—so if that’s your target audience, this may be a great platform for you. Some of the best content on Pinterest involves fashion, recipes, and DIY.

Pinterest Tip: Don’t even try Pinterest unless you have awesome visual content. Plan how you’ll do that before you just jump in.

3. Don’t Share The Same Message Too Often.

While you should share your content more than once on your social networks, it’s kind of lame to use the same wording over and over.

This is an example of what a social media calendar looks like in CoSchedule filtered to show only tweets, blog posts, events, and notes. You can see that we don’t share the same messages too often.

You have to mix up your wording and visuals to keep your audience interested. Changing out your messages with quotes, key ideas, helpful takeaways, and more may draw in someone who ignored an earlier message.

Remember, while you can share your same content on multiple different social networks, your audience uses those for different purposes. Try to connect your social messages in the best way that is right for each network.

Use A Few Headline Variations To Diversify Your News Feed

If you’re like us, you go through a ton of headlines before you find the one that’s just right.

We frequently write 25–30 headlines to choose the best ones. Some will be crap, but others might be good enough to serve as social media messages.

We write at least 25 headlines for every single one of our posts, and we use some the best ones for our social messages. This is an easy practice to help you get more social shares from the get-go, so why not maximize the work you’ve already done?

5. Stop Sharing Your Content When The Time Is Right

If you’re no longer getting click-throughs on your social media messages, it’s time to reassess.

This is as simple as spot-checking the stats for a couple of your messages. For example, check Twitter Analytics to assess your click-throughs.

This is an older post for us, but our audience finds it really valuable just by spot checking the favorites, link clicks, and shares. It’s worth it for us to keep sharing this post because it’s still performing well even though it’s been live for a couple months.

Afterward, you can redefine your sharing frequency so you don’t come off like you’re spamming your social media accounts.

You don’t have to go into great detail to make these tweaks. Just find a few of the posts you’ve shared for a single piece of content, and determine when the breaking point is to stop sharing it.

That breaking point is the law of diminishing returns for your blog content:

Really, you’re just sharing multiple messages for the same piece of content while the size of your audience remains relatively stable. When that happens, your audience will likely stop caring after a while, and you should provide new content.

Don’t let the law of diminishing returns stop you from sharing your content multiple times initially. One-and-done social media shares are how you’ll miss out on your own 31.5 times more click-throughs.

6. Combine Curated And Earned Content With Your Own

Spread The Word With Earned Content

If you’re guest blogging, help spread the word to get some traction for the company you blogged for.

If you received positive reviews, thank people and spread the news. If you were mentioned positively somehow, thank that person and share their content.

Look out for mentions of your name and contribute to the conversation.

Share How Smart Your Friends Are With Curated Content

Curated content helps you spread the word of other smart people you know—who your audience will really enjoy—and helps you so you don’t come off as a pompous, self-indulged, narcissistic self-promoter.

Share awesome content from other people with your audience.

The world is social. It’s personal. Share other people’s content like you’d want them to share yours, and you’ll open the doors to build your relationships.

7. Share Your Best Content Again

Take a look at your best content. It’s the best for a reason—share it again because others probably want to read it, too.

Look at your best content—if a lot of people shared it, you could probably schedule a few more messages in your social media editorial calendar. You can use CoSchedule to see how many social messages you’ve sent and how many are upcoming to know if you’re maximizing your best content.

8. Plan Your Social Media Messages Ahead Of Time

Now, all of this seems like you’d only do it after you write your content, right?

Nope.

You can—and should—plan your social media calendar ahead of time. Think of all these tips from the get-go and figure out the solution that’s best for you:

Understand what your audience truly wants from you to know from the get-go that the content you’re creating has a high likelihood of getting shared.

Get to know which social media your audience uses, why they use those networks, and how they use them to share content. Get your game plan together on how you’ll create the messages that will draw them in.

How do you get more followers on social media? Start by following these 30 actionable tips to help you grow your following the right way.

Stephan Heinrich

It would be very helpful if you could define templates for sharing patterns in Coschedule. So certain Blog-Posts would get a predefined sharing-plan. At present I would have to make notes and klick a million times to set up the sharing-pattern for each blog-post.

Hi Stephan, you make a great point here. We’re actually working on enhancing the social queue in CoSchedule right now to help all of our users set up more social media messages.

We don’t have templates set up as you mentioned, but I will bring that to our team.

Thanks for reading, using CoSchedule, and for helping us enhance the calendar!

Stephan Heinrich

This would be a key-feature with major customer benefit. I cannot think of any other feature that would outperform this one. I would be puzzled if this feature would be below rank #1 on your development priority list.

Marie Mouradian ~ Window Desig

I’m with Stephan on this one. A template/recipe would be very helpful. i think a standard initial share for each blog post that could be added to. Extensive article, just what I am trying to create. Thank You!

Stephan: Will you elaborate on that please. I think I know what you are saying, but I don’t want to assume.

Thank you.

Stephan Heinrich

Most of my posts are evergreen. So I have a standard procedure to promote them in social media. Alway the same scene. If I would be able to set up that publishing scene in a template, I could assign it to any post I want with one klick. That’s better than today, she I have to do like a thousand kicks to assign my scheduling scene to every singe post again and again.

Peter Cutforth

Agree Stephan, I raised that with coschedule recently as well… We will have a standard pattern of re-posting using the coschedule social queue… but if my content writer is writing the posts directly into WP, I don’t want to be paying them a good hourly rate to have to mindlessly setup the same social posting pattern for every post…. would be good if this is top of your dev list #coschedule! For now, I’ll outsource it in the Phillipines.

Hey Susanna, you have an awesome point here. I actually take screenshots of my results, too, so I can reference them later on.

I know we talked about including the headline analyzer in CoSchedule where you’d write headlines as you draft your content. There might be a way for us to include this tip in there if that feature becomes a reality.

Great article, found it useful. Only thing is that i don’t see the point in having a broad and general calendar when you have the content calendar. It might be useful for a magazine, but i don’t see the point of having it for a blog. You can have a content calendar for 4-6 months out and add more detail the closer the date comes.

Hi Robert, I hear you. I actually think that the broad and general calendar will work for some people, but to your point, it might be more important to understand your topics and how to translate those ideas into content throughout the year.

Could you imagine covering a popular topic one month, then never covering it again because you treated your editorial calendar like a magazine treats its issues? Or what if you found out after a week that the content you have scheduled for that month just doesn’t connect with your audience.

There definitely needs to be time for testing and spreading out your ideas throughout the months instead of covering something once a year and only planning to cover it again 12 months later (if that).

One question about posting on Twitter. You mention it is a great place for business tips, are you assuming everyone is blogging about business? I think that was too general a statement. I am an Interior Designer, business tips are irrelevant to my potential clients. Instagram and Pinterest are successful platforms for me. <3 Coschedule!!!

Hi Marie, great point here. Maybe that should have read something like “tips for your role, practice, job, or position.”

Twitter is kind of a mixed bag of all sorts of content, so I was shooting for just one key takeaway there—which ended up focusing more on B2B. For your interior design, I could see how business tips don’t really make sense.

I’m glad you like CoSchedule, and I appreciate that you read the post!

@nathancoschedule:disqus you MIGHT see a little more of CoSchedule’s advice in there too… ;) That social sharing timeline visual you guys put together is dope! Suggest adding LinkedIn to the timeline. :)

@nathancoschedule:disqus woah it’s like you read my mind, er, comment! Do you have this published on a post somewhere? I’ll link to it!

Taylor Paluck

@benjaminlloyd:disqus sorry for the late response, I’m trying to be more timely. But if you were still looking for the link I’ve attached it below. Thanks again for reading, keep us posted on your progress!